1. DFK's Novice Mode is a good challenge if you're a relative beginner to bullet hell shmups and haven't 1CC'd an arcade difficulty shmup before. Don't feel bad about starting on Novice and grabbing a clear there before you tackle the Normal game (hey, even try for a 2-ALL Omote or Ura clear if you want, but that's much harder!).Bawa wrote:dfk
2. In DFK 1.5, B-Strong and C-Strong are both the easiest to clear with. B is a bit faster and preferred in my opinion, but you may prefer C's spread more. Note that they were both unlocked originally with a code input in the arcade version, and only Bomb and Power were available until you input the code. Bomb is obviously weaker, but may provide more of a challenge if you find Strong style too easy, and might be easier to score with as Strong tends to sweep the screen, making chaining trickier.
Power Style is always scoring oriented, getting perhaps the highest scores possible, but is the hardest to use for survival purposes due to the lack of resources.
3. I'm not sure how they rank, but for instance a 2-ALL Omote clear of Novice 1.5 isn't super insurmountable and might not be considered that much harder than a 1-ALL of the normal difficulty (the hardest part's actually triggering the loop).
Arrange B has a very dynamic difficulty that's as easy or as hard as you grind it to be (it's more of a score attack oriented mode rather than a survival/1CC mode), Arrange A is tricky until you get a handle of how its Power Style works, and then you can do a ton of cancelling in it, etc. Version 1.51 has tweaked scoring where chucking bombs at stuff is actually beneficial for scoring (scoring is very weird in this mode as you can tell from the boss fights in this high scoring replay.) Try each and focus on the ones that click with you that you enjoy.
Not sure about how Black Label compares, but its scoring is too focused on bullet cancelling for my tastes so I haven't put much time into it.
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But a decent patching framework if anyone wants to give the rest a go.
